See Kacey Musgraves Sing Hopeful ‘Happy and Sad’ on ‘Ellen’

Kacey Musgraves visited the Ellen DeGeneres Show on Monday, performing “Happy and Sad,” from the CMA-nominated LP, Golden Hour. A ballad of romantic promise tinged with melancholy, the gauzy tune, which Musgraves wrote with her Golden Hour co-producers, Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, seems a perfect fit for the changing seasons, etched as it is in ambivalence, hope and uncertainty.

One of the song’s key lines, “I’m the kind of person who starts getting kind of nervous when I’m having the time of my life,” fit well with Musgraves’ chat with the mischievous talk-show host, who has a penchant for trying to scare her guests with various pranks. As DeGeneres asked about one of her early jobs in entertainment — appearing at children’s parties as Hannah Montana, the Disney character played by Miley Cyrus — Musgraves, who noted that her “brief stint” as the character was mostly unsuccessful, was soon startled by the appearance of another Hannah impersonator jumping out from inside the table between the host and guest and gave the singer a sufficient pre-Halloween scare.

Musgraves’ 2019 North American Oh, What a World Tour launches in January and will run through March. Half of the dates on the trek are already sold out. The upcoming dates follow her tour this year with pop superstar Harry Styles, whom she revealed to Ellen she prefer to call “Harold”.